Saturday, March 31, 2012

Mind boggling

For various reasons (okay, well, organisational penury), I've been haunting the pages of Ebay, mostly buying up bits of kit for work. Firewalls I don't know how to program, packetshapers I know go wrong regularly, that sort of thing.

But I've been amazed at the prices people are willing to pay for some stuff - more than it costs new, in many cases.

But I've just be staggered to see a 1oz palladium coin on sale for about £15,000. I had no idea what palladium was worth (although I did know it was on the pricey side) but Google is my friend and you can buy a 1oz ingot online for about $670, so on the order of £400. So that's, what, roughly 40 times the bullion value. For a not very attractive picture.

But is this a low issue coin thing? Well, okay, maybe. So I checked on the Royal Mint site. You've got the Queen's Diamond Jubilee platinum £5 coin - 94g of platinum for £6,400. Now platinum is about $1630 a troy ounce at the moment (slightly cheaper than gold, which surprised me - but the world has changed since I last worried about precious metal prices) - which works out, for a commemorative coin of only 250 issued, at a mark up of about 110%. Which seems rather more sensible. And you do get a nice box to keep it in.

Protect Your Bits

Nothing You Wanted to Know

A classical liberal & modern libertarian, economically laissez faire, and a governmental minimalist. Somewhat surprised to find this puts me way to the right of Chingis Khan.
Really, really pissed off at the endemic stupidity of the British governing cliques. Sometimes lets his potty mouth get the better of him.